Harry Houdini dangled above Denver as he made the city’s detectives his comic foils

These photos appeared on the front page of The Denver Post on Dec. 30, 1915, in the afternoon edition after Harry Houdini made good on his guarantee that he could escape any contraption Denver police put on him, as he dangled from a chain upside down over The Denver Post building near 16th and Champa streets before a crowd of 7,000.

Denver has always opened it arms to a flamboyant showman — P.T. Barnum, Buffalo Bill Cody, Duane “Dog” Chapman, to name a few. But no star could shine brighter over the Mile High City than Harry Houdini. A century later, his is still the brand name for escape, showmanship and skepticism; Denver was a crossroads for all three.

Houdini often played Denver’s Orpheum Theater, part of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit he joined when he was 25 years old in 1899, after impressing owner Martin Beck in a beer hall in St. Paul, Minn.

It was two days before the new year in 1915 that The Denver Post played host to Houdini’s largest city stage at 16th and Champa streets, as a crowd estimated at 7,000 gathered to watch him escape a seemingly impossible bind as he dangled from a chain above the newspaper’s front door.

Safe to say this was a publicity stunt Houdini cooked up with the newspaper’s co-owner and self-described yellow journalist Harry Tammen (who once said, “The public not only likes to be fooled — it insists upon it”) and the city’s new police chief. Houdini claimed the DPD had issued him a challenge from which he could not back down. As he speaks to a Post reporter the 41-year-old Wisconsinite allegedly “smooths his curly hair and smiles,” according to the Dec. 28, 1915, edition

“And since it is to be a contest, it might as well be in public,” Houdini declared. “I have escaped before and I will escape again, unless you have a set of wizards on the police department.”

[Denver Public Library Western History Collection]
Harry Houdini made regular stops in Denver while touring on the Orpheum Theater circuit of vaudeville shows between 1899 and about 1920. The theater at 15th and Welton streets was built in 1903 for a then-staggering sum of $200,000 and torn down in 1967.

According to the tale, Police Chief Glen Duffield saw Houdini’s show at the Orpheum and questioned the escapist afterward. Duffield asked about trick locks or a hidden pick. Houdini claimed to be insulted, and the chief challenged him to escape Denver’s best men, straps and locks.

“I’ll not only get away, but I’ll allow you to put me in a strait-jacket, hang me by my feet twenty-five or thirty feet in the air – and then I’ll get away,” Houdini allegedly told Duffield.

Detectives Wash Rinker and Herbert Cole brought “the strongest strait-jacket the Colorado asylum for the insane possesses.” The Post quoted one of the lawmen saying, “If you escape from that you’re going to be a wizard. It’s held hundreds of others – and it ought to hold you.”

The matter was settled in two and a half minutes, a noontime spectacle above the Denver Post building at 1577 Champa St. (a spot that today is occupied by a 7-Eleven across the 16th Street Mall from Chili’s).

“He struggled and he swerved, and he jerked and he twisted,” the newspaper reported. “His arms were locked, his hands tied, his whole being wrapped as tight as the strength and skill of two of the ablest detectives on the police force could make them. Strapped and handicapped in every possible way, he gyrated and turned and contorted — and escaped.”

“The result was the most thrilling spectacle in front of The Denver Post that has been seen in years. There were those in Denver who believed they had seen everything under the sun. They changed their minds this morning. Houdini showed them something new. For, strapped, bound, hung high in the air, Houdini struggled against the strength and skill of Denver’s police department – and Houdini won!”
— The Denver Post, Dec. 30, 1915

History supports my theory of a publicity stunt, or Houdini received a lot of challenges from a lot of local police departments during this part of his career, it would seem

Though it is unlikely those in the crowd ever forgot Houdini’s feat on that December day in Denver, it was also not likely to have been the showman’s greatest recollection of our cow town.